On the Way to the Rubber Room

February 9, 2011

On the way to the Rubber Room experiment....

A man reading a book, holding it too close to his face.  It has "beast" and "genius" in the title.

The conductor comes to collect the ticket.  Her hair is dyed an astonishing hue of red.  She hands me back a ticket.  I'm puzzled.  "You gave me two," she says.  

A young girl who sits across from me.  Instinctively, I move my foot from the seat next to her. "Don't bother," she says, "doesn't make the least bit of difference to me."  She pulls out a book by Nora Roberts and a banana which she promptly peels.  

Two guys sit down facing each other.  "You want to ride backwards?" the one guy says.  "I don't care," the other guy answers, and then less than a minute into his ride, he says, "Well, maybe I do," and he gets up to sit next to the other guy.

The young girl abruptly reaches for her cell phone, pulls it out of her pocket, looks at it, dismisses the message.  

A baby cries out in a happy way.  The girl stops her reading, puffs out her cheeks, makes gestures of approval passed down across eons of evolutionary time to the stranger baby whom I can hear but not see.

The train brings us into the station -- a combination of passengers that will never in the history of the world be together again.  

An hour the play begins, and I meet the first unique set of five characters.